This invention relates to an improved system for keeping a hose and mooring line extending from a single buoy mooring terminal in a desired direction and for facilitating the mooring of said ship to said terminal.
Present day tankers and super tankers, which carry liquids, such as oil, slurries or liquified natural gas require a draft of a size such that they are unable to tie up to the docks in the vast majority of the ports around the world. Therefore, normally, these ships are anchored at a distance offshore where they are loaded and unloaded. An increasingly popular means of loading and unloading these ships is to have them tie up to a floating mooring buoy, commonly known as a single mooring buoy terminal or SMB. Hoses from offshore run along the ocean bottom and come up underneath the buoy from whence they communicate through swivel couplings to hoses extending from the buoy to the ships. Provision is made on the buoy so that the ships can swivel around the buoy in response to the effects of the wind, waves and tides and still be moored and coupled to the hoses.
The mooring lines and hoses extending from the buoy to the ship, are normally left floating on the surface of the ocean. When a ship desires to be moored, normally a tug is sent out to pick up the mooring cables, extending from the buoy, as well as the hoses and brings these to the ship. It will be appreciated that this can be rather expensive and if possible a more expedient and economical way should be found to do the job. Not only is the use of a tug's services performing this job costly, but if it should happen that for reasons such as weather, a ship has to waste time waiting for the tug to come out this stand-by time may be even more costly than the price of the services of the tug.
Another problem arises when a hose and mooring cable, which often times are any where from 300 to 1000 feet long, are left floating on the surface of the sea. Under the influence of the wind and tides these become wrapped around the mooring buoy. A tug has to be sent out to unwrap the hose and mooring cable from around the buoy before a ship can tie up to these. This too is a costly procedure.